Like The Fish
by nightofthelivingwhatsoever
Summary: Yusuke finds himself in a very unfamiliar place after his untimely (and stupid) death. The only person to clear things up as to why he's there is a young, redhaired 14 year old girl who was murdered.


Oh geeze, I have been gone a long time! Hope my readers haven't forgot about me :3 Well long story short I transferred into an intense 2 year program in college, fell down a flight of stairs, broke my neck, went partially blind from a genetic condition I didn't know I had, broke my hand, lost my job and my fiancé and that was all in the past year lmao anywho I am just now getting back in the groove so I decided to write my first crossover. If you haven't read The Lovely Bones…I suggest you do so…

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Stupid, that's what it was. Just plain dumb. Who goes around touching live electrical wires all willy nilly? Yusuke Urimeshi, that's who. He knew it was a mistake as soon as it happened. As soon as his fingers grazed the sparking wires, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life. As he floated from the all too familiar space above his unmoving body, he wished he could kick himself for the biggest dumbass mistake in all his years. A scream below him drug him out of his own thoughts of kicking his own ass, Keiko had collapsed to her knees beside the boy's body. She pulled him halfway into her arms, shaking his body, trying to wake him.

"Father! Hurry! Yusuke's hurt!" She screamed into her parent's restaurant. Tears began welling up into her eyes and she shook him, trying to get him to open his eyes. "Yusuke, come on, wake up! You can do it, Yusuke, open your eyes, please! Don't you dare leave me Yusuke, please, don't you dare die! " She screamed at him, as her mother pried her off the boy's body.

Keiko's father knelt by Yusuke's form, gasping in shock at his electrified state. Yusuke's skin was charred and sooty, his hair slightly still static-y, and the worse was his hand. The black mangled mess they were smoked, the burning flesh smell hanging in the air; if the boy still had fingers, they were barely still attached. The older man rushed back inside to the phone for an ambulance, although he had a sinking feeling nothing more could be done.

Yusuke stood outside his body in shock, he wanted to scream, yell, anything; he wanted to comfort Keiko, tell her it's okay, soothe her sobs. He wanted to stay anything, but nothing came out when he opened his mouth. Suddenly, He felt himself being pulled backward; up through the sky faster than first time this had happened. He reached out his hands, trying to grab onto anything, finally snagging something he felt himself thud onto solid ground.

Yusuke sat up from the soft ground he laid upon. Dusting himself off, he discovered himself in the grass next to a beach. The crystal blue waters glistened in the sun, the sound of waves crashing in the distance. It all seemed so real to him, the exception being the gigantic ball and life-size model ships in oversized glass bottles floating in the perfect ocean. This strange place seems surreally perfect. Not to warm not to cold, both fantastic and slightly terrifying as one could expect from winding up in such a strange place. Yusuke looked around, finding himself alone, decided to take a look around. He was dead after all, Koenma has got to be hiding somewhere. Botan will pop up and scare the daylights out of him, he was sure of it; it would only be a second before he would see them.

As he walked, the beach suddenly grew pitch dark, the moon over head. Which was weird because it had just been high noon; looking back he saw that it indeed had been high noon just moments before, because it still was on the half that was still day.

"What the hell…" He muttered, continuing on into the night half of the beach, the waves washing up in the moonlight were just as perfect and beautiful as their daylight counterparts. Continuing up into the woods, Yusuke discovered not only does this creepily perfect place have split times of day, but also seasons, which he learned as the forest around him changed into the colors of fall. His anger was starting to grow, the more and more he looked, he still could not find the prince nor the ferry girl.

"WHERE THE HELL IS EVERYBODY!?" He finally yelled into the trees.

"I'm right here." A voice called behind him. Yusuke whirled around, finding a girl sitting in a gazebo. She sat on a bench within, her dark blue coat hugged around her body. Her smile seemed warm and genuine, but to Yusuke, it didn't seem right. He could feel that she was much older than her projected age and must have died much longer before he apparently had. She got up from her spot, walking up to his side.

"You're not supposed to stop you know." Her crimson curls bounced past his shoulder, Yusuke thought to himself that she couldn't be more than sixteen.

"Um, what?" He finally caught up with his inimical shock of her youth.

"You're not supposed to stop; you're supposed to keep going." She turned on her heel and began walking backward to smile at him again.

"I don't think I belong here. I think I need to go back somewhere, I took a wrong turn." Yusuke had followed her back to the beach. As they passed the night half of the ocean, he noticed a sand bridge between the two halves leading to a shimmering field of golden wheat with a lone oak tree right in the center.

The girl giggled, "That's what I said at first. I came to understand, though, my place was here." She gestured to the golden field.

Yusuke stopped in his step, "So does that mean…"

"Yes, I am dead. I have been for a very long time." She smiled again, continuing on ahead without pausing.

"I wasn't supposed to die, it was an accident." He said, kicking a rock in front of him.

"Neither was I, but it wasn't an accident." She looked away, sadly

They walked in silence the whole length of the beach, the ground beneath them turning white with the dusting of snow appearing. Yusuke wondered curiously, what had happened to the young girl, but he figured that would be something that was none of his business.

"I was fourteen when a man in my neighborhood murdered me in 1973." She seemed to have sensed his curiosity. "He watched me like he did the others, he waited to lure me into the trap he built under the earth, and he stole my life away from me."

"Christ, that's awful." Yusuke managed to spit out after a moment. The girl seemed just fine sharing the information; she appeared to be at ease with it.

She continued on, deaf to his words, "When I died, I ended up in this beautiful place. However, all I could think about was what was taken from me. I wanted my family back, I wanted my life back, and the anger consumed my entire being. I was filled with so much hate for the man that took my life that I willed my loved ones to hate as deeply as I did"

"Did he get caught? The man that murdered you?" Yusuke felt a tingling feeling and realized the world around him had dissolved into scene; they were now standing in a parking lot, lit by the neon of the truck stop behind them. Yusuke watched a middle aged man talking to a street kid who obviously didn't want anything to do with him.

"No. The police were on their way to arresting Mr. Harvey, but he fled. He thought he had gotten away," She looked over at him as the teenage girl told him to piss off, "But sweet karma found him soon in the most ironic of ways, and in the end, I think that was a more satisfying end to his evil." At that moment, a large icicle broke off the tree above him, causing him to stumble, and fall head first down the embankment; his lifeless body landing in a twisted heap at the bottom.

"My sister once won a contest where her perfect murder weapon was an icicle. She said that it was perfect because once it melted, there was no trace left." She smiled, the scene now changing to that of a younger, copper haired girl in a track uniform.

"She looks smart. I had a friend who was like that." Yusuke's mind flashed to Kurama for a moment.

"Lindsey was very smart. She's the one that caught Mr. Harvey. She found the proof that forced him to run." The girl in the image suddenly appeared in a full on sprint, clutching some sort of black book in her arms as she ran from the man Yusuke had just witness fall to his death.

"He planned every one of his murders in that book, every detail, everything he could remember. It was kind of like a journal, he used it to relive the terror he inflicted on us." She turned away from her murderer's face, returning to the beach.

"How many were there?" Yusuke had heard her talk about murders in the plural sense, so there must have been more than just her.

"Nearly half a dozen," She sat down near the water and let the water wash up on her feet, "The youngest was six years old."

"That's sick!" He ran his hand through his hair, though he could really feeling it, it was more out of habit.

"Yes it was. But I have come to accept that there are evils in this world far beyond the mind can think of." She pulled her knees up to her chest, "Can I ask you something?" She gazed up at him.

"Sure, anything you want to know, I'm an open book." Yusuke crouched down beside her.

"What happened to you? I mean, how did it happen? You look too healthy for it to be an illness."

Yusuke chuckled, "It was an accident. There was an electrical line down near my girlfriend's parent restaurant, and I tried to move around them and turn off the power. I touched the stupid wires and got electrocuted. Stupid." He laughed, holding up the hand that had gotten mangled.

The girl paused for a second then grinned ear to ear "That's, um, really stupid!" she burst out into giggles. "I'm sorry I don't mean to laugh, but who does that!"

Yusuke joined her laughter, doubling over from the pain in his ribs, "I know, it's so dumb, I got myself killed!" He finally settled down, flopping on his back in the sand. "This isn't like the first time I died, this is different."

"You were dead before?" She piqued at this information.

"Yeah, I dove in front of a car to save a kid" he said, "The grim reaper came for me and took me to the afterlife and I got a second chance from the Prince who judges the dead. He said it wasn't my time yet." He picked up a shell in the sand, looking at it closely before chucking it into the water. "I don't understand why I didn't go back there."

The two sat in complete silence for a moment. Sitting there in silence as they watched the waves wash in.

"It's because this isn't Heaven," She gestured around them, "You went to the In-Between. I think it's where souls go when they aren't quite ready to move on. I was here for a long time, before I could finally move on."

Yusuke glared at the water rushing towards him, he hated this place, what had happened to him, and most of all, he hated that he didn't know how to move on. Finally he asked, "How did you move on?"

She smiled again, "I faced the crimes my murderer committed. I met his other victims, and then, my mom came home." She looked down at the water to see it change into her mother walking into her unchanged room after years of it being untouched. "She was so devastated that she left for a long time, she left my brother and sister, my dad, grandma, and most of all; she left me. She closed off the part of her brain that thought of me because it was too painful. But when she finally came home, I realized that I was free. "

"I haven't spoken to my mom in months." Yusuke admitted. "She's always on one of her benders; I don't even know where she is half of the time." He, too, glanced at the water, this time it changed to Atsuko; draped over a random table in some filthy bar.

"She looks so lonely," the girl said, "You know what? I think she just needs to know that you're still there. That's what it took for my mom; she just needed to know that her family still loved her."

She rose once more, this time, not bothering to wait for Yusuke. "You should go to her and tell her everything you wanted to. I left this world without saying a word and I got stuck here, I waited so long just for my one special person to listen. Then I knew I was free." She continued a little ways to the sand bridge.

Yusuke looked longingly at the image, suddenly feeling waves of sadness wash over him. He thought back to his friends; Kuwabara, Kurama, Hiei, Keiko, Botan, everybody. Then, his mother; he had left her once before without a word and now he was doing it all over again. _'This is going to destroy them all'_ He thought to himself.

"I need to go back!" he called to the girl, "I have to say goodbye this time, I can't just leave! This isn't how it was supposed to happen!" Tears made his way to his eyes. Was this really what his fate was? To lay in the empty world watching his loved ones as the dead girl had?

Suddenly, the girl turned back to him, giving him a small smirk; "Yah know? I don't think you belong here after all." She turned back, continuing toward the lone oak.

"What does that even mean!?" Yusuke yelled at her, "I'm here because I'm dead! I did something stupid and now I'm dead! I won't ever get to see them again! They won't ever hear me again!" The spot where his heart used to be began to burn; he barely felt a jolt course through him.

"That's the point." She called to him, "You're still not ready yet! Your life has not ended yet, Yusuke Urimeshi."

Yusuke got to his feet and ran to her, the pain in his chest increasing, "Wait! I don't understand! Why did I come here? How do you know me?" Another pain sent him to his knees.

"I'm not sure either. Sometimes, people get lost so fast, they need some help getting back. I think you were lost, Yusuke. You lost yourself in life and didn't even know it. Your friends you jhold so dear; you rarely see them anymore. You barely speak to you mother, I think you came here to see what it is to lose, Yusuke." She giggled again, "And when you're actually dead, I mean really dead. You see a lot of things in Heaven."

The jolts of pain were getting worse; through the hurt, Yusuke could feel the start of a pull, gentle at first, but now becoming stronger. The girl had almost gotten to the oak when he called out for her; "Wait!" She turned toward him, "What's your name?" He had gone through all this and realized he didn't even know her name.

"Salmon." She replied to him

The pain momentarily stopped, "Like the fish?" He asked.

"First name: Susie." Then she turned and ran past the oak, disappearing into the Heavens.

Yusuke felt one final jolt, and then he was jerked back. As he was flung back to where he was, he opened his eyes and saw millions of souls soaring past him, and he wondered if they knew where they were supposed to be.

The sound of machinery rang in his ear and his first thought was how annoying they were. Groggily, Yusuke opened his eyes to the ceiling. After a few minutes, he leaned up from his inclined laying position, almost too shaky to do so. Everything around him looked fuzzy and everything attached to him hurt like hell. He dropped his eyes down to see his mangled hand bandaged in hospital gauze and apparently missing the last two digits.

"Ow…" He managed to groan out.

"Oh my god! Yusuke, you're awake!" Keiko jumped up from her spot in the corner and rushed to his side, looking him over. "The doctor's said they didn't know if you would wake up…"Tears welled up in her eyes and she soon started sobbing.

"My everything hurts," His voice sounded like sand paper, but he didn't care. He just felt so happy to see Keiko once again. "Don't cry, I'm okay." He managed to croak out. Suddenly, the room was flooded with people who had heard the commotion. All of his friends were there, Keiko's parents, even his mother, who shockingly looked to be completely sober. They all crowded around his bedside, looking him over; everyone with happy tears and ear to ear grins, even Hiei his satisfactory neutral face on, not quite mad, not quite happy, but that as good as he would get.

"Dude, we thought you were a goner. The Docs had to shock you, like five times!" Kuwabara gently ruffled Yusuke's hair, "You were in that coma for, like, two weeks!"

"We were so worried about you!" Atsuko blubbered through her tears. Yusuke smiled and took his mom in a hug.

"Don't worry, mom. Do you really think I'd leave without saying goodbye?" He said as he hugged her tight. "I'm not goin' no where."

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A/N: End! Yay! My first little crossover for coming out of hiatus! Yay! Please review as they are my life blood! Thanks!


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